Featured in Architecture & Design

Monal Daxini presents a blueprint for streaming data architectures and a review of desirable features of a streaming engine. He also talks about streaming application patterns and anti-patterns, and use cases and concrete examples using Apache Flink.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Joy Gao talks about how database streaming is essential to WePay's infrastructure and the many functions that database streaming serves. She provides information on how the database streaming infrastructure was created & managed so that others can leverage their work to develop their own database streaming solutions. She goes over challenges faced with streaming peer-to-peer distributed databases.

App Inventor for Android

App Inventor is a beta release from Google labs that allows drag and drop development of applications for Android phones. Instead of code, App Inventor allows you to visually design applications and use blocks to specify application logic.

Application developers (not necessarily programmers) select "blocks" from a palette, drag and drop them to the application area, and modify properties (e.g. the text that appears on a button). Your phone is tethered to your development machine and your app is downloaded as you build it, so you can test / confirm your work. The available palette includes basic blocks (e.g. buttons, text, check box, canvas) as well as blocks for media playback, geo-location, social networking (e.g. connecting to Twitter), sensors (camera, accelerometer), and "programming stuff" (e.g. database connection, loops, conditional execution).

Enterprise developers are increasingly tasked with finding ways to port all or part of an organization's application software to the Web and/or mobile platforms and vendors have responded with tools to facilitate these tasks. InfoQ has previously noted tools like PhoneGap, Rhodes and Ruboto-IRB, Silverlight and HTML 5 with CSS 3. Most of these tools are concerned with cross-platform compatibility while App Inventor is strictly for Android phones.

To access App Inventor, you are required to complete a short form that includes providing an email address - which must be a Gmail address. Tutorials and sample applications are available. App Inventor is a beta release

Re: source code

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When I wrote this post, it was my understanding that because the tool is built using other open source software, it too will be open source. However, at the moment it is in beta and you have to be invited to use the tool on a Google server via a browser.